Alexander reminded me that Black once said that he was prepared to let his editors have a completely free hand except on one subject. He forbade attacks on American Presidents in general and President Reagan in particular.

Entry for 18 April 1986, Not Many Dead

The success of Michael Moore’s film about Roger Smith and General Motors has aroused an envious spirit of emulation in my breast. ‘Conrad and Me’, a script which I hone and burnish in slack moments, has the following points of mild interest. In the summer of 1985, I wrote an article for the Spectator about Ronald Reagan’s colon cancer. I said what I believed to be true: that Reagan and certain of his advisers had known of the deplorable state of his health before the 1984 Election, and had chosen to cover it up along with much else. I cited some reputable medical writers to this effect. I then allowed myself some very vulgar thoughts about how Reagan, his colon in disrepair, would manage America’s affairs in the critical years to come. I’m a bit contrite about those paragraphs now: they were ill-tempered and mean-spirited and Reagan’s astounding moral, mental and physical deliquescence between 1985 and 1988 does not make them any less so.

I paid scarcely any attention to a letter that the Spectator subsequently published. It was a frothing note from some Canadian business mogul named Black, who evidently hero-worshipped Ronald Reagan. In his closing sentences this entrepreneur speaks of buying up some English newspapers in order to put me, and others like me, out of a job. I had a brief cackle on the telephone with the Spectator’s then-editor and filed it away under ‘department of empty threats’.

I had much the same reaction after meeting a British financial writer in Washington. He had been in Toronto to interview Black about something, and had found him swirling around his own boardroom, beating the air with the offending copy of the Spectator. He repeated verbally the claim he had made in print – that his motive in acquiring a newspaper empire was to cleanse the business of people like me. My friend said the bloke had seemed quite serious, and laughingly added that if Black did acquire complete control of the Telegraph I would be held accountable.

Black went on to depose the decrepit Berry family entirely. Who cares, I thought. I never wanted to work for the Telegraph and they never looked like offering me a job anyway. Then I stopped writing for the Spectator in order to accept an offer from the New Statesman. At a Spectator garden party, in front of my brother and other witnesses, Conrad Black surged up to Charles Moore and congratulated him on firing me. Ever the gentleman, Moore courteously pointed out that there had been a few lines in the magazine thanking me for my services and even regretting my departure. Then Conrad Black bought the Spectator.

Well, I reflected, that’s still several jumps behind for the tycoon from the Dominions. Another sulphurous letter from Black, rebuking Charles Moore and repeating all the litany against myself, was later published in the Spectator and marked the first time, to my knowledge, that a proprietor had helped himself to his own correspondence column. Heigh ho, I thought, pretty soon Black will be announcing he is a poached egg and shouting for large slices of toast to be laid out in his sanctum whenever he feels the need of a lie-down.

Then, this year, when the Sunday Correspondent invited me to be its American contributor, Black, or someone with a North American accent calling himself Conrad Black, was on the telephone within hours of my being gazetted, barking that I was a disgrace to the profession and should not be employed. Indeed he made the very damaging accusation that I was ‘a mental case’. A few weeks later, he was boring a dinner table in Georgetown, and loudly announcing that I ought to be ‘exterminated’. (If Black reads this, or as he would probably prefer to say, if he has this ‘drawn to his attention’, he may care to know that more than one of the guests gave me separate but identical accounts of his conduct at this soirée. He evidently has a knack of inspiring affection and loyalty in his friends.) Now, I am merely a lone scribe living on my depleted wits. Do I have the right to take offence at this campaign of harassment and defamation from a multimillionaire? I think – I think – I shall let it go for now. If Mr Black wishes to know why I may choose to spare him, he will have to read to the end of this article, or pay someone else to read that far on his behalf.

Letters

Readers of the London Review of Books are presumably expected to sympathise with Christopher Hitchens’s account of Conrad Black’s campaign against him (LRB, 28 June). However, although I have virtually nothing in common with Black – certainly not his politics or his wealth or his power or his ruthlessness – I must say that I actually sympathise with his view of Hitchens’s journalism. Hitchens himself calls one of his articles ‘ill-tempered and mean-spirited’, and that seems a fair description of most of those I have read over a period of nearly twenty years.

They belong to a form of journalism he shares with several figures right across the political spectrum (such as Alexander Cock-burn and Tom Nairn or Auberon Waugh and Paul Johnson or Richard Ingrams and Julie Burchill), which depends on abuse and rhetoric rather than analysis and reason, and which attempts to arouse emotion rather than increase understanding. Ten years ago I told him I thought he was a discredit both to his profession and to his politics, and I still think so. No, I wouldn’t want to ban him – or anyone else – but I certainly don’t want to read him.

It is surely remarkable, worth perhaps an entry in The Guinness Book of Records, that our own Conrad Black should generate such tedium as to bore even those capable of surviving a dinner with Mrs Thatcher and a London military ritual (LRB, 28 June). Little wonder that the Economist, not many months ago, described Canada as one of the most boring countries in the world.

Everything about Conrad Black is tedious, not to say banal, but it is surely a mistake to confuse individuals with the country that spawned them, or else where would England be? What lies at the root of dicta such as that attributed to the Economist (multiple cross-references, but see the Letters of 13 September 1990) whereby Canada is found to be ‘one of the most boring countries in the world’? Pine-tree envy? It appears to be little more than an up-market version of the Sun’s contemptible campaign to ridicule the French. Britain is overpopulated, badly polluted, deprived of the guarantee of basic human rights with, consequently, a self-serving judiciary and a sycophantic press. Such a country must, in all charity, he forgiven for a habitually sour response to another which has transformed its colonial status, most recently thanks to strong and effective human rights guarantees, and workable cultural pluralism. The Canadian-Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) has been unaccountably ignored in recent discussions as to how human rights should be entrenched in the United Kingdom, despite the fact that it provides an obvious contemporary model. Sensitive response to the natural environment is not seen to be the prerogative of selected inheritors of the nature poets, ‘Our Age’ or any other clique. The example of living native cultures makes such exclusivity untenable.

Canada is not perfect – that would, no doubt, be boring. As it is, the label can only be applied in ignorance.

I couldn’t agree more with Ian and Charlotte Townsend-Gault (Letters, 10 January) about Canada. Who are we in Britain with our slavish press, failing democracy, racism and insouciance to be so condescending and dismissive? And so consistently? I spent two weeks at a writers’ conference in Toronto in 1987. I liked the city very much, found Canadians pleasant, open, articulate and spirited. On the campus we talked about less numbing things than ‘Lark Rise to Laura Ashley’ and who was going to be next Master of St Ethwold’s, I found that students – a new experience – didn’t treat their seniors like faintly unpleasant slugs that had somehow got tiresomely onto the fingers of Thatcher’s children as they popped things into their mouths. Floreat Canada.